for about a year now i am trying to get ccc (compaq c compiler for linux/alpha) working without success.
and yes, i know the great gcc.
is anybody around who has a working ccc? (or cxx or cfal or compaq-jre or compaq-jdk)

I don't think you'll have much luck using compaq-tools to be honest. Lots of packages are using gnu extensions not supported by ccc and gcc has probably catched up (or superceded) ccc in most areas by now as ccc hasn't been actively maintained for quite some time.

PS. The Gentoo/Alpha team haven't supported compaq-tools for at least 2 years by now, so anybody wanting to use compaq-tools are on their own when it comes to bugfixing. And please don't expect us to add ccc patches to the tree either, even if we're offered patches.

You'll find a lot of different distro's have issues with Alpha support. You may notice in time that a some programs such as prelink don't even work but are still included!

Compaq C is a pretty good compiler and depending on the situation, can give you boosts in speed upwards of 50% with 30% being the norm incomparison to GCC-3x. Compaq C really shines when it comes to programs that use a lot of floating point calcs, the more, the faster it will run generally. GCC-4.0.1 is a better deal and actually has a speed hit of about 10%.

A lot of programs can be built with Compaq C, but most desktop setups use GCC Extensions... Most of my server applications and system libs [not incl. GLIBC] are compiled with Compaq C, programs such as ffmpeg, apache, pure-ftp, bind, mysql [buggy to build with ccc and gcc], postfix, dovecot, sendmail, xinetd, slocate, cups, python, tcl, php, mnosearch, perl, gimp, samba, etc. You just have to make sure you use the -ansi_alias flag to relax CCC when it comes to GCC Extensions.

When it comes to installing Compaq C, you will run into three problems... none if you're lucky:

1) Running the config script for setting it up... Works with older versions of GCC, but once configured, you can use any GCC compiler...

2) GLIBC headers... depending on what version of GLIBC you have installed, you will need different patches for the header files... namely features.h and pthreads.h... If you find the corresponding patch for your GLIBC version, you can simply open the header files in question and modify other wise a lot of programs that you build using it will generate numerous header include errors... [you may wish to check over at alphacore.info, the forums section has several members that have various GLIBC patches that can get you up and running]. Another easy way around the GLIBC problem is to simply install GLIBC-COMPAT... its an old build of GLIBC-2.2 and simply build against that. That's what I did for several years by simply including -L/usr/alpha-glibc21-linuxalpha-glibc21-linux/lib -I/usr/alpha-glibc21-linux/include to my build cflags to point the compiler to use that version of GLIBC to build against].

3) A lot of poorly written code and code using GCC Ext. will not build but most of will be programs that do not follow the Standard ANSI C/C++ protocol. Some can be easily fixed, such as Xfce. My entire install of Xfce is compiled with CCC, but others are deal breakers. For example, KDE and Gnome use GCC Extensions big time while programs such as Fluxbox or simply poorly written...